The impacts of congestion on commercial vehicle tour characteristics and costs

Analytical modeling and insights, numerical experiments, and real-world tour data are used to understand the impact of congestion on urban tour characteristics, carriers’ costs, and distance/time traveled. This paper categorizes tours into three classes based on their tour efficiency and variable costs structure. Travel time/distance between customers and depot is found to be a crucial factor that exacerbates the negative impacts of congestion. Travel time variability is a significant factor only when travel time between depot and customers is considerable in relation to the maximum tour duration. For each customer, it is possible to define a dimensionless coefficient that provides an indication of the relative impact of congestion on routing constraints. Congestion also affects carriers’ cost structure, as congestion worsens the relative weight of wages and overtime escalates and the relative weight of distance related costs decrease.     

N-kernel: A review

The package performs estimation and prediction in the context of time-series or cross-section nonparametric models. It is menu-driven and very easy to operate. The manual reads well. This version has some limitations, which can easily be corrected. Nevertheless it provides a useful pedagogical and research tool, even for people not familiar with nonparametric analysis.     

Firm Size and Geographical Aggregation: An Empirical Appraisal in Industrial Location

This paper assesses empirically the importance of size discrimination and disaggregate data for deciding where to locate a start-up concern. We compare three econometric specifications using Catalan data: a multinomial logit with 4 and 41 alternatives (provinces and comarques, respectively) in which firm size is the main covariate; a conditional logit with 4 and 41 alternatives including attributes of the sites as well as size-site interactions; and a Poisson model on the comarques and the full spatial choice set (942 municipalities) with site-specific variables. Our results suggest that if these two issues are ignored, conclusions may be misleading. We provide evidence that large and small firms behave differently and conclude that Catalan firms tend to choose between comarques rather than between municipalities. Moreover, labour-intensive firms seem more likely to be located in the city of Barcelona.     

Unemployment Hysteresis in the US States and the EU: A Panel Approach

This paper applies the panel unit root test proposed by Im, Pesaran and Shin (1997) to test for unemployment hysteresis in the US states and the EU countries against the alternative of a natural rate. The results show that hysteresis for the EU and the natural rate for the US states are the most plausible hypotheses.     

Stabilization mechanisms in a monetary union

The stability of a monetary union entails the establishment of mechanisms that allow the member countries to smooth their paths of consumption after negative shocks in their income. A centralized fiscal institution could help countries through a mechanism of taxes and transfers. In this paper we study the stabilizing effects of different mechanisms of compensation in a two-country general equilibrium model subject to asymmetric technology shocks. In particular, we have focused on an optimal system of taxes and transfers as opposed to a discretionary transfer mechanism, finding that the optimal transfer consists in an intertemporal distribution to the economy that experiences the negative shock instead of a current high transfer as in the non-optimal mechanism. Lastly, we have assessed the degree of stabilization related to the mechanisms in question, showing that the optimal mechanism can match the degree of stabilization the empirical literature attributes to the case of the United States.     

Foreign Direct Investment in Mexico since the Approval of NAFTA

Cross-country panel data are used to assess the effect of free-tradeagreements on flows of foreign direct investment (FDI). Free-tradeagreements are found to have a significant positive effect onFDI flows, and free-trade agreements are found to matter morefor the smaller members of the agreement. For example, the NorthAmerican Free-Trade Agreement’s (NAFTA) effect on FDIflows into Mexico is much larger than its effect on flows intothe United States. These cross-country results are used to assessNAFTA’s effect on FDI flows into Mexico. After controllingfor a set of other factors—such as an increase in worldwideFDI flows—the trade agreement is found to generate FDIflows nearly 60 percent higher than they would have been withoutthe agreement.     

What explains Latin America's poor investment performance during the 1980–2001 period?: a panel unit root analysis

This article analyses the theoretical and empirical links between key economic variables and private investment spending in Latin America during the 1980–2001 period. The Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) estimates for the pooled investment model suggest that real (lagged) public investment, the output gap, lagged domestic credit to the private sector, and the national savings rate have a positive and significant effect on private capital formation, while the standard deviation of the real exchange rate index has a negative effect on private capital formation. A major contribution of the study is the application of recently developed panel unit roots test on the stacked residuals of the pooled regressions. The tests indicate that the included variables have a stable, non‐spurious (cointegrated) relationship. All in all, the findings in this article make an important contribution to the ongoing debate about which policies need to be promoted to raise and sustain the rate of private capital formation – Latin America's future source of employment and income creation.     

Optimum management and environmental protection in the aquaculture industry

The sustainability of the aquaculture industry has recently been the object of social and scientific debate, due to the contamination caused by the culture to the surrounding environment. As a contribution to the debate, this paper analyses the effect of adopting a Pigovian tax to internalise the environmental costs on the optimal management of farms. To do so, we make use of dynamic stochastic models of fish growth and contamination diffusion. Farms can also implement some measures to abate pollution, which are divided into two types: those applied continuously (“managerial” measures) and those once in a culture cycle (“structural” measures). The results reveal that the tax imposition lowers the optimum size in the farm. The type of abatement strategy plays a central role in the determination of the optimum harvest size. A need for caution in internalisation policies is emphasized, as negative consequences could arise in certain cases, putting the farms' survival at risk.     

A Panel Unit Root and Panel Cointegration Test of the Complementarity Hypothesis in the Mexican Case: 1960–2001

Using panel data, this paper tests whether public and private capital have a positive and significant effect on aggregate output and labor productivity for Mexico during the 1960–2001 period. The richer information set made possible by the sectorial data enables this study to utilize the methodologically sound “group-mean” fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) procedure developed by Pedroni to generate consistent estimates of the relevant panel variables in the cointegrated production (labor productivity) function. The results suggest that, in the long run, changes in the stocks of public and private capital and the economically active population (EAP) have a positive and economically significant effect on output ( and labor productivity). The period is also broken down into two sub-periods: 1960–1981 (state-led industrialization) and 1982–2001 (neoliberal model). The estimate for the public capital variables clearly shows that it had a relatively more important economic effect during the earlier state-led period.